Co-Sponsored by the Department of Philosophy and the Workshop on Precision Medicine: Ethics Politics, and Culture
Maël Lemoine (University of Tours): Medicine without Diseases
5:30 pm on Monday, May 9th, Philosophy Hall 716, Columbia University
Philosophers have discussed the definition of the general concept of disease, but have paid less attention to the general concept of a “disease entity”. Whereas the former aims to distinguish healthy from pathological states, the latter aims at a distinction between pathological states. But what would happen to the concept of disease if the concept of disease entities were abandoned? An intuition may be that the demarcation between “health” and “disease” would go unchanged. Yet this would lead to a conflation of both functions, namely, of the health/disease demarcation and the Disease A/Disease Z demarcation. This result is a potential consequence of so-called “precision medicine,” in particular, of theranostic approaches that aim to match disease signatures with treatment signatures while potentially bypassing the step of categorical diagnosis. In this talk I present what I call the three models of disease – the disease entity, disease mechanisms and disease signatures – and demonstrate how health and disease should be distinguished for a naturalist philosopher of medicine applying a disease signature model instead of a disease entity one.
Sue Weinberg Lecture
Public Health Skepticism and Respect for Women’s Voices
Anne Barnhill (Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, University of Pennsylvania)
Jessica Martucci (Fellow in Advanced Biomedical Ethics, University of Pennsylvania)
OCTOBER 28, 2016, 4:30-6:30pm
The Graduate Center, CUNY
Room TBA
Andrea Pitts, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, gives a lecture entitled:
“Carceral Medicine and Prison Abolition: Trust and Truth-telling in Correctional Healthcare”
The United States Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that the privation of healthcare for incarcerated persons would constitute a violation of the Eighth Amendment. While that ruling, in effect, mandated a standard of care for incarcerated persons, the institutional means through which healthcare is provided in federal, state, and private detention facilities have been neither uniform nor without their share of problems. A number of human rights organizations and prisoner advocacy groups have documented patterns of neglect and malpractice within the nation’s prisons, jails, and detention facilities, including basic sanitary concerns, undertreatment for severe illnesses and injuries, and the structural incapacity of many correctional healthcare systems to meet the needs of their aging patients. Alongside the literature outlining concerns in correctional healthcare, a distinct and theoretically dense body of evidence on the structural patterns of racism operating through carceral systems in the U.S. has also demanded scholarly and political attention. Much of this work marks the continuities that mass incarceration in the U.S. has with historical patterns of disenfranchisement, exploitation, and state-sanctioned violence inflicted on communities of color, and especially Black Americans. Within this discourse, arguments for penal abolition have become prominent alongside critiques of structural racism. In this vein, a number of scholars and activists have been calling for the comprehensive dismantling of penal institutions, legislative measures, and associated corporations that have built the very carceral networks that perpetually inflict harm on communities of color both in the U.S. and abroad. In dialogue with contemporary research on correctional healthcare and literature on institutional racism in the context of clinical and colonial medicine, this presentation analyzes trust and truth-telling among patients and providers in correctional settings with the aim of developing an argument for the abolition of systems of incarceration. While the improvement of systems of healthcare has been defended as an important goal within the field of correctional medicine, structural epistemic injustices operating through race, gender, and disability within correctional medicine point toward a broader argument for the dismantling of carceral systems of punishment more generally.
Bio:
Andrea J. Pitts is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Their research interests include philosophy of race and gender, social epistemology, Latin American and U.S. Latina/o philosophy, and philosophy of medicine. Their publications appear in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Radical Philosophy Review, and Inter-American Journal of Philosophy. Dr. Pitts is also currently co-editing two forthcoming volumes: one on the reception of the work of Henri Bergson in decolonial thought, feminism, and critical race studies, and a volume on contemporary scholarship in U.S. Latina and Latin American feminist philosophy.
Prof. Vardit Ravitsky, Ph.D.
Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT) is a new technology that allows genetic testing of a fetus with a simple maternal blood test, by isolating cell-free fetal DNA in the mother’s plasma. Introduced in 2011, it is now available globally, its cost is declining, and the number of conditions it can test for is increasing. Technically, this technology can be used to sequence the entire genome of a fetus early in the first trimester of pregnancy. Should this use of prenatal testing be banned? Limited? Offered? Encouraged? Covered by insurance? This talk will explore some ethical implications of this possibility. It will focus on reproductive autonomy and the transition from ‘knowledge is power’ to ‘knowledge is vulnerability’ in the context of informed choice.
Vardit Ravitsky, PhD, is Associate Professor at the Bioethics Programs within the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine of the School of Public Health at the University of Montreal. She is also Director of the Ethics and Health Branch of the CRE, an interuniversity research center in ethics. Prof. Ravitsky’s research focuses on reproductive ethics and the ethical aspects of genetic and genomics. Her research interests in bioethics also include health policy and cultural perspectives. She is particularly interested in the various ways in which cultural frameworks shape public debate and public policy in the area of bioethics. Her research projects are funded by CIHR, FRQSC, SSHRC, and Genome Canada. She published over 100 articles, book chapters and commentaries on bioethical issues, and is lead-editor of “The Penn Center Guide to Bioethics”.
Born and raised in Jerusalem, Ravitsky brings international perspectives to her research and teaching. She holds a BA in philosophy from the Sorbonne University in Paris, an MA in philosophy (with a specialization in bioethics) from the University of New Mexico in the US, and a PhD in philosophy (with a specialization in bioethics) from Bar-Ilan University in Israel. She was a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Bioethics of the NIH and at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI).
Ravitsky is an elected Board member and Treasurer of the International Association of Bioethics (IAB). She is a member of Canadian Institutes of Health Research (the ‘Canadian NIH’) Standing Committee on Ethics. She is also member of the University of Montreal’s Public Health Research Institute (IRSPUM), the Quebec Reproduction Network (RQR), and of the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society (CFAS). Previously, she was faculty at the Department of Medical Ethics, School of Medicine, at the University of Pennsylvania. She was also a Senior Policy Advisor at CIHR’s Ethics Office and a GE3LS consultant to Genome Canada.
April 25, Saray Alaya-Lopez (Cal. State, Sacramento), “Agency in Structural Explanations of Injustice.” 6:30-8:00pm, CUNY Graduate Center 5414.
May 23, Karen Jones (U. Melbourne), “Radical Consciousness and Epistemic Privilege.” 6:30-8:00pm, CUNY Graduate Center 5414.
Jim Weatherall (University of California, Irvine)
There will be dinner after the talk. If you are interested, please send an email with “Dinner” in the heading to nyphilsci@gmail.com (please note that all are welcome, but only the speaker’s dinner will be covered). If you have any other questions, please email isaac.wilhelm@rutgers.edu.
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Metro Area Philosophy of Science group (MAPS) Presents:
Heather Demarest (University of Colorado, Boulder)
Abstract: I argue that if we take the standard formulation of special relativity seriously, causation is frame-dependent. Thus, many ordinary causal claims require a parameter to specify the relevant frame of reference. This is in contrast to the widely-accepted belief that the causal structure of the world is objectively and absolutely determined by the light cone structure. Any event that can affect another (so the thought goes) must do so via light or matter, and the spacetime structure will tell us which of those came first, absolutely. For instance, according to Carl Hoefer (2009, 694, italics in original), if we assume that all signals travel slower than or equal to the speed of light, “we may take the light-cone structure of Minkowski spacetime as equally representing the causal structure of spacetime.” I argue that causation in relativistic spacetime is not so simple. Events can be extended in space and time, and events can be related to one another by distance and duration. Yet, according to special relativity, extension in space and time (i.e., distances and durations) are not invariant—they depend upon relative motion. Therefore, when ordinary events enter into causal relations, they do so relative to frames of reference, which can yield different causes and different effects. If you want to keep your promises, or bring about one outcome rather than another, you should take note of your reference frame.
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Abstract: Hugh Everett III’s pure wave mechanics, sometimes known as the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, was proposed as a solution to the quantum measurement problem. Both physicists and philosophers of physics have repeatedly claimed to be able to deduce the standard quantum probabilities from pure wave mechanics alone. We will consider why this is impossible, then consider how Everett himself understood quantum probabilities. This will involve clearly distinguishing between typical and probable quantum worlds.
The paper draws on the first sentence of Nicomachean Ethics I, but goes beyond interpretation in putting forward a new version of the Guise of the Good (GG). This proposal is Aristotelian in spirit, but defended on philosophical grounds. GG theorists tend to see their views as broadly speaking Aristotelian. And yet they address particular actions in isolation: agents, the thought goes, are motivated to perform a given action by seeing the action or its outcome as good. The paper argues that the GG is most compelling if we distinguish between three levels: the motivation of small-scale actions, the motivation of mid-scale actions or pursuits, and the desire to have one’s life go well. The paper analyzes the relation between small-, mid-, and large-scale motivation in terms of Guidance, Substance, and Motivational Dependence. In its Aristotelian version, the argument continues, the GG belongs to the theory of the human good.
Katja Maria Vogt, Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. She specializes in ancient philosophy, ethics, and normative epistemology. In her books and papers, she focuses on questions that figure both in ancient and in contemporary discussions: What are values? What kind of values are knowledge and truth? What does it mean to want one’s life to go well?
Presented by The New School for Social Research (NSSR) Philosophy Department.
The CUNY Graduate Center Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) and the Philosophy Program present a talk and book panel on:
RACIAL JUSTICE
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 3 (Rooms 9204-5)
4:15-5:00 PHILOSOPHY COLLOQUIUM LECTURE:
“Racial Justice”: Charles W. Mills, Philosophy, CUNY Graduate Center
5:00-5:05 Break
5:05-5:45 BOOK PANEL on Charles W. Mills’s 2017 book, Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism
Frank M. Kirkland (CUNY Hunter College & the Grad Center)
John Pittman (CUNY John Jay College)
5:45-6:30 Q & A
6:30-7:30 BOOK PARTY—Philosophy common room, 7113 (food and drink)
In Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues that justice is good not only for its consequences but also in and of itself. Challenged by Glaucon and Adeimantus, who suggest that all human interactions are inherently competitive and that being unjust could help you get the better in these conflicts, Socrates establishes that justice is good because it is harmony in the city and in the soul. If justice is a kind of health of the soul, then surely it is better to be just than unjust. This claim might ameliorate the concerns of Glaucon and Adeimantus, but I will argue that Plato does more than address the vision of justice brought forth by Socrates’ interlocutors. Particularly through the contrasts among the different kinds of lives that are either described or depicted in the Republic, Plato points his readers toward a conception of justice that reveals it as the ground of mutuality, reciprocity, dialogue and friendship. In fact, the Republic reveals justice to be necessary to the philosophical life and, hence, to the best kind of life.
There is a broad consensus that Aristotle introduced the concept of matter in order to develop a consistent account of substantial change. However, it is disputed which role matter fulfills in substantial change. According to the traditional interpretation, matter persists while taking on or losing a substantial form. According to a rival interpretation, matter does not persist in substantial change; instead, it is an entity from which a new substance can emerge and which ceases to exist in this process. In my view, both interpretations are problematic in the light of Aristotle’s broader ontological project and are at odds with the way Aristotle describes the substantial generation of living beings. On the basis of Aristotle’s biological theory, I will suggest that Aristotelian matter is a continuant in substantial generation, but does not satisfy the common criteria for persistence that apply to individual substances.
Anna Schriefl
Anna Schriefl is Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin (assistant professor) at the University of Bonn, and currently a visiting scholar at the New School. She has published a book about Plato’s criticism of money and wealth, and most recently an introduction into Stoicism (both in German).